RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

Like Darken said, this is a super common problem that almost every has. Unfortunately, it's a super common problem because the causes are incredibly diverse. You have to look inside yourself and figure out WHY your well of inspiration is running dry. It could be a loss of interest, burnout, or uncertainty of where to go with the story. Each cause has different remedies, and there is no one catch-all solution.

I have ADHD and take meds for it, and I have the exact opposite problem. Once I get serious on a project, tearing away from it mentally is incredibly difficult (hence why I worked on Prayer of the Faithless for 7 years). Even when I do suffer from writer's block, I can't just step away and do something else. Like scuba diving and not realizing that your oxygen tank has been empty for a long time.

For me, it helps to have a goal. I usually start a project by setting up the beginning of the story and laying out one or two key moments that "define" the story's purpose. The struggle then comes from trying to connect the dots, but it at least gives me direction so that I always have something to work towards. Whenever I got stuck in a rut in PotF, I took a step back and examined why I got in the rut to begin with. Sometimes it was because I was burnt out, other times it was because I accidentally wrote myself into a corner and didn't know how to properly escape from the situation. To fix the latter actually required scrapping themes, plot threads, and even entire areas to fit the narrative pacing better.

Sometimes when you just don't have the creative drive, it can actually help to consume a bunch of media instead of trying to force your way through it. Seeing the products of other's inspirations might just give your own inspiration a kick start. There are some cool games here on this site that you might want to try out, especially if they're using the same engine, concept as your current project.

I'm interested! It'll be a nice change of pace from my current project. Do we know what engine will be used for this game?

My parents gave me underwear.

Among other things, granted, but nothing else worth talking about.

My advice is to start with a premade base and pixel smaller stuff like clothes and hair so you can learn from a solid foundation. If you're learning how to pixel from scratch, your bases will look out of place since you're still figuring out how everything works.

My very first game on this site had me edit the sprites of the main characters using the RTP as reference for shading and color selection so they wouldn't clash too much with the RTP art style:



My latest game used the POP! Horror sprite bodies as a base and I pixeled all the hair and clothes myself. To back up Darken's and Ocean's statements that lower resolution is the way to go when learning, all sprites and tiles for that game were made at half resolution and were upscaled to the proper size before being imported to the project. (hidden for size):

It depends on the game and what it wants to emphasize.

For me, personally, it's less about the amount of items you can carry and more about how useful those items are. You can have 99 item stack and can hold every item you can possible pick up, but if you don't use them, then they mostly just serve as fluff to provide players a comfortable backup instead of a crucial component of the gameplay. Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door and Legend of Dragoon are good examples of useful items with a limited inventory. You have limited inventories in both games, but attack items give you options that the party's skills just don't cover, like an AOE lightning attack or inflicting certain status ailments.

I did something like this in Prayer of the Faithless by limiting the item stack ceiling to 10 instead of 99. Despite the limited stack size, I encouraged players to use items more by:

1: Making them cost no Stamina to use (in PotF, every action costs Stamina, even basic attacks).
2: Preventing players from picking up items in the field if they have a full inventory so they can go back and get them if they need/want to later.
3: Making them relatively inexpensive to purchase from shops compared to other items.
4: Making attack item's damage scale based on the user's Attack stat so that items found in the beginning of the game are viable even at the end.
5: Having attack items bypass a crucial defense stat when used against an enemy.